State budgets are of particular interest for studying authoritarianism. Due to their redistributive function they hold a key position within the political regime. More specifically, fiscal policies can be used as a strategy to attach different groups to the regime and thereby securing the reign of the authoritarian leader. Both the revenue collection side and the expenditure side may serve an option to grant policy concessions to either the ruling elite or the citizens. For instance, the taxes can be only imposed on one group, or subsidies provided for solely one group. The paper aims to study the characteristics of the state budget in a comparative perspective. While taking the different authoritarian regime types into account, the analysis is based on panel data for authoritarian states between 1990 and 2005.
